Crackdown (20 page)

“Watch me,” I said.

Rickie whimpered as, one by one, I tore the three bags open and tossed their contents to the wind. The keys of heaven’s gates were scattered to the sea and the angry wind and the malevolent sting of rain. God knows how much that cocaine was worth, but enough to make even Rickie Crowninshield cry as he watched the powder vanish into the dusk. When all three plastic bags were empty I washed them in a bucket of sea-water, tossed the fouled water overboard, then stuffed the clean bags into the gash bucket. “Is there any more on board?” I asked Rickie.

“No,” he said quickly, eager to please me. “None. Really.”

“If I find any more,” I told him, “I’ll hurt you properly.” At that moment I hated him. I hated his weakness, his tears, his money, his misused privilege, his deceit, and his utter uselessness. “So tell me about Sweetman,” I said. “He put that stuff aboard?”

“Yes, he did. Yes.”

“So who is he?”

Rickie seemed puzzled by the question, as though he expected everyone to know who Sweetman was. “He’s our supplier,” he said at last.

“Your supplier? You mean at home?”

“Yes, sure.”

“But you’re two thousand miles from home. What the hell is he doing here?”

“I don’t know.” Rickie was crying harder now. “I just don’t know.”

“Why the hell did you want to come on this boat if you weren’t going to make any effort to give up?” I asked angrily.

“I do want to give up! I do, I do, I do!” He was grizzling pathetically; a tall crumpled broken boy.

“Go away.” I could not hide my revulsion, but I don’t suppose he noticed. He just crept below.

I stayed on deck as night fell, and I told myself that I stayed there to make sure that the anchors were holding, while the truth was that I simply did not want to go down and look at Rickie’s tearful, bloody face or at Robin-Anne’s soulless vacuity. So instead I sat in the cockpit, hunched against the splashes of rain, and watched the night fall black across the fretting lagoon. I sensed that the storm had either passed us to the south, or else that it had not worked itself into its full frenzy.

“So just what did you expect of Rickie?” Ellen’s voice interrupted me. She had silently appeared in the companionway, holding a spare oilskin jacket that she now tossed at me.

“I don’t know.” I pulled the jacket round my shoulders as a protection against the small rain that was falling, then shifted down the thwart to make room for her.

Ellen sat and brought a bottle of my Irish whiskey out of her oilskin’s pocket. “You didn’t hide the bottles as well as Rickie hid his cocaine.” She poured three fingers into a glass. “So just what did you expect of him?” She handed me the glass.

“A little effort,” I said. “This whole goddamn mess was his idea.”

Ellen groaned. “Come on, Nick! This isn’t a Boy Scout cruise! He’s a very sick boy!”

“Then he should be in a hospital!” I spoke very bitterly. “He shouldn’t be here. We’re not trained to deal with Rickie’s kind of crap.”

Ellen poured herself some whiskey, then stared across the break in the lagoon towards the open sea. It was almost full dark, but we could just see how the wind was whipping the exposed waves into a churning mass of whitecaps. “I suppose,” Ellen said after a while, “that you’re planning to tell the senator that we can’t cope with Rickie?”

“Something like that,” I confirmed her guess.

She gave me a rueful look. “I could really use the three months’ money, Nick.”

It had not been so very long since Ellen had savaged me for lumbering her with the company of rich junkies, yet now she was arguing for continuing with the cruise-cure. “I just can’t take three months of Rickie,” I said very fervently.

“What you really hate in him,” Ellen said in a most prosaic voice, “is that he reminds you of yourself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped, and meant obnoxious as well.

“He’s just like you,” Ellen said flatly. “He’s rejected the world of his famous father. I’ve often thought that the real silver spoon in this world is not how much money you’re born to, but how good an address book you inherit. I can’t really believe that all those second-generation actors and politicians and writers are born with natural talent, they’re just born knowing the right people, and familiarity means they’re not afraid of their parents’ trade, while the rest of us poor saps have to work our way up the hard way. But you rejected your father’s world, just as Rickie is rejecting
his
father’s world. I admit the rejections take different forms, but rejection is almost always graceless. I doubt your father enjoyed you being a marine, any more than the senator likes Rickie smoking crack.”

“I am nothing like Rickie,” I said very clearly.

“You’re a rebel,” Ellen said, “only your rebellion took the perverse form of seeking out respectability. Why did you become a marine?”

I sought for a flippant answer, but none came, so I offered Ellen the truth. “Because my father marched to the American Embassy to protest against Vietnam, and he was in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and the one thing he always professed to hate was militarism. So.” I shrugged, as though the rest was obvious.

Ellen smiled. “Sweet, handsome Nick.” She said it very fondly and with what seemed to be some pity. “Could you have been an actor?”

“No.”

“But you probably wanted to be, and you probably felt horribly inadequate against your father’s excellence, and that’s just what Rickie is feeling now. Rickie has probably felt inadequate all his life, and right now, when he’s been given into our care, all he finds is this horribly competent Brit who scowls at him, and makes him feel useless, and shouts at him not to tread on the sailcloth or to wind a line the other way round a winch, and is it any wonder that he’s as miserable as a cat in a rainstorm?”

I growled, reluctant to accept the criticism.

Ellen smiled. “Be nice to him. Find something to praise!”

“What am I supposed to do?” I bridled. “Tell him his hair looks nice?”

“At least he has a comb and makes an effort,” Ellen said pointedly. “No, but you have to start somewhere. He’s fascinated by the boat’s electronics, so why don’t you praise him for that? He spent two hours experimenting with the radios today, and perhaps he’d like to hear you say how clever he is for having mastered the equipment?” She smiled encouragingly at me. “The journey might be a thousand miles, Nick, but it begins with a single step.”

I said a few very rude words to show what I thought of such sententious rubbish. Ellen, for all her sour wit, had moments when she tried to swamp the boat in American niceness.

She sighed. “Just give him a chance, Nick.”

“Sod him.”

“So eloquent, you English, so very eloquent.” She stared briefly into the sky as though seeking inspiration, then looked back to me. “You shouldn’t have hit him.”

“Why not? He deserved it.”

“No one deserves to be hit. Violence has never solved anything, it merely suppresses and disguises truth. Your father, whatever else he might or might not be, is surely right in his hatred of militarists.”

“My father”—I wearily leaned my head against the cockpit’s coaming—”would march to support the Movement to Burn Babies if he thought it was fashionable. I didn’t rebel against his beliefs, because he doesn’t have any. I rebelled against his lack of truth.”

Ellen sighed. “How very strict you are, Nick. That’s probably why Robin-Anne is so besotted with you.”

That made me snap my head upright. “Besotted?”

“She’s in love with you,” Ellen saw my astonishment and laughed at it. “She thinks you’re the strong man who’ll protect her from the demon drug. You’ve become her solution now, her magic potion.” Ellen mocked me with a smile. “Congratulations, Nick, you can marry six million bucks! You can be son-in-law to the President! Wow! You can invite me to the White House for a plastic chicken dinner! All you need do is pop the question.”

“It isn’t like that,” I said feelingly. “Robin-Anne talks to me about cocaine, but not about anything else. If she’s in love with anyone, it’s Thessy! They’re inseparable. She’s certainly not in love with me!”

“Oh, but she is. What do you think she talks about with Thessy?”

“Jesus and cocaine. He told me.”

“Jesus, cocaine and you,” Ellen corrected me with a smile. “Ask Thessy if you don’t believe me. She pumps him for information about you; what your star sign is, your favourite colour, what you like to eat, that sort of thing.” Ellen grinned, but I could see she was being deadly serious.

“Oh God.” I leaned my head back again to let the spitting rain strike my face. “Then that’s all the more reason,” I said softly, “to abandon the cruise. Robin-Anne has to learn to beat drugs without me.”

“Oh, that’s very pious!” Ellen poured me more whiskey. “But very callous, too. This kid is trusting you, Nick!”

“Oh, shit.” I did not want the responsibility.

Ellen laughed. “Three months, Nick, that’s all you have to give them, and at the end of three months we’ll pick up our big fat cheques and we’ll sail your boat across the Pacific. Is it a deal?”

I turned my head and smiled at her. Somehow, after the last few days, that dream of the South Seas had faded almost to unreality. “Are you really going to sail with me?” Ellen had already said as much, but I wanted to hear her say it again.

She pretended to think about it, then nodded. “I like you, Nick Breakspear, because you reinforce my convictions about men.”

I smiled. “I take it that isn’t a compliment?”

“No,” she returned the smile. “They say a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, but I guess I’m just the odd fish out, and I have a hankering for bicycles, and especially for old-fashioned, upright and honest bicycles.” She paused. “And do you want me to be really honest?”

“Of course.”

“Your father was the most handsome Hamlet that ever was.” She let that one sink in, then laughed, blew me a kiss, and was gone.

Ellen had made me feel better, and she had also left me the Irish whiskey, though I did not drink any more that night. Instead I waited till I was completely certain our three anchors were holding, then I went to bed, but via the forward hatchway so that I need not see either Rickie or Robin-Anne who were slumped in front of the television in the main stateroom.

I took one last look through the cabin port. The wind had slackened, so that the anchor rodes were no longer thrumming like harp strings. The rain seemed to have stopped altogether. A rift opened in the clouds beyond Sea Rat Cay and a weak shaft of moonlight touched the island so that the nearest pines looked as though they had been dipped in molten silver. “The worst of the storm’s gone,” I told Thessy, “so we’ll be off first thing in the morning.”

“God villing.” He looked up from reading his gloomy minor prophet.

“Tell me”—I tried to make my voice very casual—”but does Robin-Anne talk about me to you?”

The poor boy had obviously not wanted to tell me before, and now looked horribly embarrassed, but he could not tell a lie so he nodded. “All the time, Nick. She says you say poetry in the dark.”

I laughed, then shook my head to show Thessy that he should not take Robin-Anne seriously. “Ellen says we should persevere for the full three months.” I wanted to know how Thessy would react to such a prospect.

He frowned in serious thought, then nodded. “I think if God vanted us to give up, Nick, he vould not have let us begin.”

I supposed that made sense. “Thank you, Thessy.”

“Sleep vell, Nick.”

And, surprisingly, I did. To dream of
Masquerade,
and cleanness, and of far-off northern seas as cold as steel. I dreamed of home.

I
woke early to hear the wind sighing in
Wavebreaker’s
shrouds and clattering the palm fronds on Sea Rat Cay, but I could tell, even without looking at the wind-gauge, that the storm was dying. Thessy was snoring gently in the other bed, so I rolled quietly out from under the sheet, pulled on a pair of shorts and went on deck. It was the break of day and a wan watery light was leaching into a sky that was ragged with clouds touched leprous yellow by the rising sun.
Wavebreaker
fretted to her anchor rodes, but with no great force. The foetid stink of wet vegetation was wafting from the island on a wind that was still blowing the open sea ragged, yet the barometer was rising and I saw no reason why we should not be under way within a couple of hours.

I went below and made myself an instant coffee and used the rest of the hot water to fill a shaving bowl that I carried back to the deck. I propped a mirror against the binnacle, and scraped happily away. I tunelessly sang myself some cheerful song as the wind snatched the foam off the razor’s edge and whirled it quivering into the scuppers. The same wind was thrashing the trees ashore and crashing the seas against the outer coral so that the waves shredded white into airborne foam, yet, and despite the wind’s remaining strength and my own rendition of ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,’ the dawn suddenly struck me as strangely quiet. That thought made me pause, razor poised by my throat, so that for an instant I must have looked uncannily like a man contemplating suicide.

Why was the morning so quiet?

I straightened up as I realised what was missing from
Wavebreaker’s
usual dawn chorus; it was the hollow clatter of the wire halliards tapping against our metal masts. For a second or two I wondered whether Ellen or Thessy had woken in the night to stretch the halliards away from the masts to silence their insistent racket, but that was not the answer. Instead, when I looked, I saw that we had no halliards any more.

There had been halliards the night before, now there were none.

I stared stupidly into the rigging, the cut-throat razor forgotten in my hand. There were no halliards left, none. Not on either mast. I went to the foot of the mainmast and worked the sailcover back from the gooseneck and found a stub of wire protruding from the sail’s peak. The wire had been sheared clean so that its severed end shone with the brightness of newly exposed metal.